Korean Buddhist Journeys to Lands Worldly and Otherworldly

Abstract

This Presidential Address explores Korean Buddhist travel undertaken for religious training, missionary propagation, and devotional pilgrimage. By traveling to India and throughout East Asia, as well as to the mythic undersea bastion of the faith, Koreans demonstrated their associations with the wider world of Buddhist culture, whether it be terrestrial or cosmological. Simultaneous with continued travel overseas to the Chinese mainland and the Buddhist homeland of India, Koreans also brought those sacred sites home through a wholesale remapping of the domestic landscape. As local geography became universalized, there was less need for the long, dangerous journeys overseas to Buddhist sacred sites: instead, the geography of Buddhism became implicit within the indigenous landscape, turning Korea into the Buddha-land itself. Once this “relocalization” of Buddhism had occurred, Korean Buddhists were able to travel through the sacred geography of Buddhism from the (relative) comfort of their own locale.